For most of my working life, I occupied an office in London’s great Natural History Museum, tucked away from the gaze of the crowds, hidden away among the vast backroom collections. I am a paleontologist by trade, a researcher into ancient life, and an expert on a marvelous group of long-extinct animals: trilobites. When the museum stopped paying me, I wrote about life behind the scenes — where research science was paramount. Dry Storeroom No. 1 was my plea for sustaining study of the world’s fauna, flora, and fungi, and a celebration of the eccentric and extraordinary people working in the museum who made that knowledge possible.

However, a deeper itch needed to be scratched. Collections were all very well, but I wanted to revive the naturalist I had been when I was a boy entranced by just about everything alive...

It’s a lot like naming the baby. The search for the perfect title torments some authors all through the writing of their books. And although readers can’t (or shouldn’t) judge a book by its cover, its title is a different story.

Once in a while the ideal title will spring to a writer’s mind right along with the initial idea. This happened to Joseph Heller in the case of Catch-22. Heller visited my high school in the early 1960s when Catch-22 was an international bestseller and told us the memorable story of its naming and renaming: he had always called the book “Catch-18” while writing it, he said...

Describe your latest book.A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is an essay collection in three parts: the first, which has the same title as the book as a whole, includes essays on art and literature; the second, "The Delusions of Certainty," is a long essay on the mind-body problem; and the third, "What Are We?," is comprised of lectures I have given at various academic conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

The essays, all written between 2011 and 2015, explore versions of the same questions: What are we? How do we see, remember, think, talk, and feel? I have become convinced that no single discipline provides definitive answers to these fundamental questions. Therefore, over the course of the book, I turn to both the humanities and the sciences for answers...

How would you describe your job?
I'm a bookseller at Powell's City of Books. I pair great books with eager readers, kind of like pet adoption for the brain. I work in metaphysics, art, science, gay and lesbian studies, and Catholicism.

Where are you originally from?
I hail from the Deep South, Mississippi, which has a violent, troubled past and present, and has consequently birthed some amazing writers, musicians, and artists. Jesmyn Ward and Donna Tartt share my home state, as did Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner, among scads of others. The Oxford Conference for the Book is kind of a big deal, too, like Wordstock.

What is the most interesting part of your job?
I have the privilege of working author events twice a week, which is an incredibly fast-paced and creative endeavor. Audience members are often dedicated, passionate readers, and they get all starry-eyed...

We’ve been talking a lot at Powell’s about the election, our country’s deepening divide, and the challenges ahead of us. One thing we can all agree on is that there’s nowhere we’d rather be working right now than at a bookstore. Our faith in books and their ability to inform, to inspire, to entertain, to comfort, and to effect change remains unshaken. Here you’ll find a sampling of books we’re reading now to guide us through this tumultuous time. We encourage you to add your own reading selections in the comments below...

There is nothing quite like the joy of receiving handmade gifts, and there are plenty of reasons to make them. Handmade items can be an affordable alternative to boutique purchases, and creating custom goods gives you the ability to personalize what you’re making to fit each recipient’s specific tastes. Handmade crafting is also a wonderful way to draw friends together in a group activity, which has the added bonus of "many hands making light work," as the proverb suggests.

Whether you’re after a holiday party favor, a stocking stuffer, or a little something to fight off colds, here are four holiday craft projects you can make in about an hour for gifting to your near-and-dear ones. These were chosen from books you can use and draw inspiration from, not only for crafting and sharing during the holiday season but over and over again year-round, in the artful elevation...

Describe your latest book.
My new book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, is a sequel of sorts to How We Got to Now, the book and PBS series I did a few years ago. Like How We Got to Now, Wonderland is a history of innovations that helped shape the world we live in today; it's filled with a similar cast of eccentric tinkerers and visionaries and jumps from discipline to discipline and across many historical periods the way most of my books do. But Wonderland is also trying to make what I think is an important argument about the forces that drive historical change. A surprising amount of big shifts in technology, or science, or politics can be at least partially attributed to activities that started out as purely playful ones...

Hurrah! It’s one of our favorite times of the year! It’s the holiday potluck where we get to celebrate some of the recently released cookbooks by cooking and sharing with coworkers. Whatever your political view, the last few weeks have been hard, and for some of us, very disheartening. So we found it especially comforting to join together at the table, to take a moment to relax, chat about food, gossip, and just talk about simple nothings. Dining together is a good way to find common ground amongst differing factions, and a welcome respite for all during challenging times.

We had some bang-up main dishes, such as a sweet potato curry from Oh She Glows Every Day, and a colorful vegetable succotash dish from local chef (and TV chef personality) Naomi Pomeroy’s cookbook, Taste and Technique. Some of the best food comes in small bites...

Drawing on new sources from the Royal Archives, Victoria: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire tells the story of a Victoria we have never known before: a woman who struggled with so many of the things we do today: balancing work and family, raising children, navigating marital strife, losing parents, combating anxiety and self-doubt, finding an identity, searching for meaning.

At 20, she fell passionately in love with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, eventually giving birth to nine children. While Victoria and Albert’s relationship is remembered as monumental, there is much about their relationship that you may not know...

How would you describe your job?
I help prepare financial statements and budgets, and do tons of other money-related stuff.

Where are you originally from?
I was born in North Carolina (Fort Bragg army brat), raised in Central Florida (the wonderful world of humidity, hurricanes, and Disney), and transplanted to DC for 11 years (go Nats!) before moving cross-country to keep it weird in PDX.

What did you do before you came to Powell’s?
I took time off from the nonprofit accounting world to focus on writing for children and young adults. I sold four short stories, finished a YA fantasy that garnered two full manuscript requests (but alas didn’t make it to publication), and wrote a middle-grade novel (for which I received the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship for Young Readers)...